LUIZA LOUBACK
Undaughters
When I was a baby, my mom molded me from mud. Submerged my tiny head into the viscous brown liquid, letting the soil grow roots in my tortuous teeth. She bathed me in dusty roads in the middle of nowhere, the sun rotting my joints and us, feeding on the hot luminescence.
When I cut my tongue by biting plastic cups of Guaraná soda, my mom made me swallow it until the tainted taste dissipated. I became knife-bound to scars, reversing my flesh within myself as my mother wiped them clean.
At signs of ridged skins and open wounds, mom searched for the cure in the wind, curling air between her fingers. Letting the breeze trace her eyelids, she used to say: “If the air does not move, there is no wind, if we do not move, there is no life.”
Mom walked for hours, tasting her skin burn under the daylight, watching the houses become white and tall, the street fresh. She scrubbed clothes until her knuckles bruised and the soapy water turned red. She clothed chubby legs, her fingers outlining smooth skin, imagining waves under her palms.
After, she came home and I watched her body drooping into itself, her hand a wrinkled peach pit. Sometimes, I dreamt of mom standing still, surveying the distance between her body and the sky. I smiled as I imagined her standing in the precipice of an old valley, yawning with boredom, no one to take care of.
When the wind was not enough, mom lit her own fire. Like a shooting star, she drank the bright and brief warmth. Sitting around the heated underside of bonfires during Festas Juninas, I thought we were chasing days we could never catch, moments we could never change. We were burning ourselves for a country that didn’t love us back—there is no sweetness in the scorching.
When I went to school, staring at bare orange bricks, my stagnant hands sweating, I wondered what mom would think of me memorizing another country’s pledge like a crucifix. It felt like sinking in a river of blood, bending to a cursed homeland.
Mom taught me that people forgetful of their memories are estranged from their own selves. I became afraid of vomiting into the past, staining my flesh with foreign eyes. When the teacher narrated blistering massacres, I cupped my ears, surveying something pulsing and alive splinter into shards.
In our language, there is not a word for forgiveness. Nobody has taught us to forgive, only to forget. Like the first blooms of spring, we are an inherited birthright to those above us. They sink their teeth in our mountains and rivers, arrowheads pointed to our hearts, exorcize life from our soil.
At night, mom’s lips parted in soft prayers. “Let those who have known this place their entire lives reach the clear water and drink.”
Now, I feel drops of rain slide down my bareback. I can’t feel my legs. Looking in the mirror, I see wet bed sheets, gulped ankles, me halfway to drowning. I touch my blurred reflection, bound to exist in spaces that are too small.
Change, for the first time, is coming to fetch me.
I am knuckling my pupils, picturing landscapes opening like a wound and spilling out old ghosts. I am bleeding abandoned stories, stitching cows with stomachs open.
I am trying to not forget. Children braiding rain clouds into each other’s hair, my grandma farming her body to the world, my mother playing in rivers, elbows deep and hands creating life. Tangled in embraces, I am leaving myself.
When I was eleven, I ate chocolate for the first time. A piece so thin, it disappeared in a single lick. I recall my tongue sucking on itself, fingertips sticky. How I cried brushing my teeth. How I laughed and it was so strange that I corrected myself as if a foreign soul had come to meet me. Mom said, voice deep and booming like a flood.
“Good things do not last.”
I want to mark these memories like paint, smear my heat-shriveled womb, dip my fingers into all the seeds I ever planted. I am trying to dissociate myself from this tragedy. From torn wounds and mud escaping, swallowing acres with dead bodies named after poisoned lands.
My mom appears in the doorway, a silent sadness, a wish that creeps into her mind and withers. Deepened lines pushing into the sides of her lips, like she dug her toes into the crumbled edge of a rock. Mom reached her hand over to mine, squeezed it gently.
“Nothing is forgotten forever, even if nobody remembers it.”
The rain is heavier now. Together, we tend to ancient sites of worship, watch our house crack awake.
We let the mud bury us bone-deep, swallow our body as a sacrifice.
Luiza Louback is a Brazilian writer. Her work appears in Bridge Ink, Kalopsia Journal, and Parallax Review, and has been recognized by The School of New York Times, Barnard University, and more. She is an incoming undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.